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March Madness is coming up, and before I get into technical talk about your March Madness Tournament Bracket Chances let me just say the NCAA is pretty evil with the way they run sports. Basically, the coaches make ridiculous salaries higher than the president of the University. Title IX created an adverse effect on sports participation with dropping men’s programs like gymnastics and wrestling, which is actually a coed sport. On top of that, the football and basketball athletes work on a grueling schedule, and the college degree that they earn is a sufficient payment to them. Most people know that the big time college athletes are given breaks and take joke classes. The last case I heard of a potential high earning prospect got a respectable degree was David Robinson. I remember a couple years ago they showcased this one wrestler from Stanford in the NCAA Division I finals with a 3.9 something Mechanical Engineering GPA. Coaches love to use them as an example and their delusion that all student athletes are capable of doing such things without struggle. Their real job is football or basketball, and they are not paid a dime. If the pro hopefuls do not make it, they essentially lost 5 years in salary. I remember the school quarterback at the University of Colorado got busted robbing a house wearing a Scream mask about a year after his college career. He obviously didn’t get drafted by the NFL. It would be horrible decision for a high school player good enough to make it into the NBA rather than risk getting hurt playing college basketball on your $0 a year salary. Watch the video above to see John Oliver say it how it is.

Last year there was a lot of talk about Warren Buffet offering a billion dollars to anyone who can predict a perfect bracket. To the people who think they have a chance at picking a perfect bracket and winning one billion dollars, let me tell you something. To store all the individual NCAA bracket permutations in the simplest form (A binary number consisting of 67 ones and zeros) for March Madness, it would take

267 / 8 / 1000 / 1000 / 1000 = 18,446,744,100

terabytes. The internet consists of about 170 terabytes. We all know how big a terabyte is and this large number of terabytes happens to be higher than the number of seconds since the Big Bang! So go ahead and full out multiple brackets believing you are doing something productive. What is interesting is that all of these permutations can be represented in a data structure that would be less than one kilobyte. I could be wrong, but I believe a Suffix Tree would be the most efficient.

The last thing I would like to mention which may be off topic is programming speed. I happen to program in Python quite a bit. I can put things together in very few lines of code and it looks very clean. However, today I did an experiment to see how much faster C, unanimously considered the fasted structured programming language. The test was to add an integer from zero to one billion. I would assume that Python wouldn’t have an issue with running fast on a simple task. But boy was I wrong. First off I am running an iMac with Yosemite on a 3.1 gigahertz Intel Core i5 with 12 Gigabytes of DDR3 Ram. I used gcc to compile:

Here is the Python code, which may hint why I like to write code in Python:

for i in range(0,1000000000):
pass

I was able to track the time using the -m cProfile option when running the script in terminal.

The C program ran in 2 seconds and the Python program ran in 42 seconds. The thing is, most of the time I don’t notice these things when writing code in Python, the scripts I write are probably ideal for Python.

That’s right I said it. Try doing a Google and Bing search for Knag Enterprises. The first result in Google is a CrunchBase profile of my company. CrunchBase is basically a database of containing company profiles and includes an official link to this website. Google actually ranks this site and third when this is supposed to be the official site. Bing got it right, why can’t the Google Gods get it right? Upon further review, the CrunchBase site ‘earned’ its spot over my website by having hundreds of backlinks from CrunchBase subdomains. I even spoke with Google on the phone recently to about listing my site, but they only showed the Google Plug page, not my official website. From my experience, the algorithm is really bad and simply outdated. It has been several months now, and the ranking still will not budge. I even tried to remove the content from the CrunchBase site to no avail.

I use Quora quite a bit, and I posted a well-liked answer to the question, “Do people use Bing instead of Google?”. I’ll go ahead and post what I said here:

I use Bing in my Facebook web searches.

Facebook now apparently eliminated Bing Search from their main search engine. However, I have now decided to make Bing my main search engine. I now consider Google to be the equivalent to the yellow pages and feel as though they should not profit of my searches. Bing has an interesting compromise with giving reward points for using Bing to redeem gift cards which can add up if you consistently use it. If you get the max points for a whole year, which is not hard, it can add up to over $120.00 in various gift cards including Amazon. When I am actually researching something, I would likely start out with a Bing search and expect some sort of Wikipedia article. Over time, I found out I was mainly using Google just to lookup Wikipedia pages so I gave it up. However, I will concede that Google is better at finding non-English material. For instance, Google is better at finding programming variables used in various open source libraries.

People that will not give it a shot could possibly experiencing something similar to this:

It’s a well-known fact that elephants are some of the most powerful animals in the world. But amazingly enough they can be trained to believe that they can’t break free from a single weak rope.

How?

Well, in captivity, from the time the African elephant is born it is tied up with a normal sized rope and the baby elephant tries and tries for months to break free but never does. Eventually the elephant begins to believe in the ABSOLUTE POWER of this rope.

No matter how many thousands of pounds of behemoth muscle the young elephant gains, it has now concluded that fighting against the rope is a losing battle. It submits to the FACT THAT IT’S IMPOSSIBLE to break free from the flimsy rope.

It’s mind is controlled and conditioned to believe failure is the ultimate outcome if it bucks against the rope, when in all actuality all it would take is effort to test it out again and the rope would SNAP!

I find this interesting and similar to the mindset of many SEOs when it comes to doing what it takes to break free from the fear of Google’s ALL-knowing/ALL-mightiness.

Have you been TRAINED to believe that Google knows what you are doing before you even do it? Are you afraid to continue persistently backlinking your sites with thousands and thousands and thousand of links, yes DIRECTLY to your site, because you KNOW you will fail if you do? Are you afraid to add your keyword to your title more than twice? Are you SURE that a “sandboxing” is a bad thing and that you MUST stop whatever got you there immediately and pray for Google to let your site live again? If so? Ask yourself this… WHY?

Have you tested it out lately? Have you not GROWN in knowledge as an SEO?

Thanks. Here is another way to look at it: When searching for things, since many are used to Google and have some sense as to what an accurate search result would include, people may at first be disappointed that Bing search results are not as ‘accurate’ as Google. However, one should appreciate stumbling across unexpected results. With a little more effort, users should run into unexpected information. Over time, Google has turned into the modern day Yellow Pages as well as answers to questions ASAP.

Here is a link to the discussion on Quora, which I feel is a pretty good website geared towards intellectual conversion. However, in just about every area of the online world exists trolls that do pollute the website.

I just tested out the Oculus Rift DK2, and I am blown away. It is going to be a game changer, unlike Google Glass that had good hype up marketing but the product that will never be released to the public never delivered. Facebook made a really good decision in acquiring Oculus. I can’t wait to start developing for the Oculus Rift! I will continue to update this post as I spend more time with the Rift. I’m also excited to finally use Microsoft Visual Studio, which is supposed to be the hands down best IDE.

When I tried out the first demo Unity engine, I was blown away, it was just so cool. I can easily see every kid wanting one for Christmas. In addition, I tried out a horror app which was rather lame, and a roller coaster app that didn’t impress me much. However, as time goes on, more and more cool material will be available for device, and I am happy to part of the movement. One thing that slightly worries me is that Valve, the company that owns Steam is also planning on making a device similar to the Oculus Rift. It will be interesting to see if Playstation and Xbox decide on using virtual reality devices, and what device they choose. I am very worried about which device wins over the market share, since it should be easy to port my project code from one device to another.

So far I have spent the majority of the time configuring it and trying to install various things on it. One thing that is particularly annoying about running various applications is running apps that are not ‘Direct to Rift’, meaning that the application runs as an extended external monitor. With DK2, they added the ‘Direct to Rift’ option that does not treat the device as an extended monitor and is a lot more seamless. The third day I had it, the visuals looked really blurry. I thought there was something wrong with the device. It was really frustrating, I tried using the Rift with different operating systems and different graphics drivers but nothing seemed to get the job done. Then one day, I look at the lenses, and remembered that this problem happened when I tried out the near sighted lenses. Then I realized I had put on the lenses backwards! I’ve tried out Half Life 2 on the Oculus Rift and I am very impressed. There is a lot of talk about these types of devices being used for pornography experiences. I don’t know if I am willing to throw away my morals for profit, the whole idea weirds me out.

As for my Google Glasses, as I have mentioned before I considered it a gamble in case it took off. They are now stored away with the hopes of being a rare item on Antiques Roadshow one day.

Google Glasses Stored Away

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As a mobile software developer it is essentially my duty to keep up with the latest technology trends. Buying the newest, and most advanced devices to help detect potential projects. I’m not ashamed to say that I paid $1,500 on a pair of Google Glasses when Google has decided that they will not release Google Glasses to consumers. To me it is essentially gambling. No one can truly predict the future, so true entrepreneurs step up to the plate and to try make something happen. Being intelligent and over analytical can even hurt businessmen as decisions need to be made to be different from other competing companies. If a bad decision is made, at least the person knows what he did wrong and will not make the same mistake again.

I have mentioned in my previous post about the new Bluetooth Low Energy technology. I believe it is capable of being a real game changer in the smart phone world. The idea I had using the Bluetooth LE technology was to make a true car finding app that marks the user’s GPS location when the user loses the Bluetooth connection from the car turning off. Bluetooth LE should not use much power at all, it is just the GPS location that will use most of the power. Currently, Apple permits GPS type apps to run in the background, however, it is not clear if apps are permitted to open and run on command in the background attempting to find a GPS location. Anyhow, an app like this can be developed with limited resources. I recently purchased this Bluetooth receiver, it is for using speakers with your iPhone wirelessly. When a car shuts off, the Bluetooth receiver should lose its power as well, giving us all we need to make a quality car finding app. However, obtaining the rights to use Bluetooth technology is no picnic, it requires appropriate licensing that are designed for giant companies. Maybe one day they will see the light and open up the world to a gold mine of technological innovation.

Another great use for this Bluetooth receiver is to connect with headphones to watch movies in bed with headphones on. The walls in my apartment are really thin, and my neighbor forgivingly complains about the noise level every now and then. It would be nice to have the technology to mitigate this issue.

I now for the issue I’ve been trying to solve for over 3 years now. I own a really nice pair of Bose QuietComfort headphones. I love them, however, I feel that they should be wireless. If it can’t be 100% wireless, it should at least not have to be tethered to a smart phone. With the inexpensive Bluetooth receiver above, along with the portable USB charger listed below, one can conceivably have their Bose QuietComport headphones attached to the Bluetooth receiver, which is powered by the portable USB charger. The receiver and charger can fit inside a jacket pocket leaving your smart phone 100% wireless. By the way, I have tried out the Bluetooth integrated headphones. I was disappointed by the sound quality and the battery life. While this setup may be more for techies, it can help make ski trips and such a lot of fun.

Hey, I need your help. I was using my Instalist app and I still have not bought a present for my girlfriend for Valentine’s day. I picked out some things, but I’m not sure if she would like products listed. You can send recommendations in the comments or PM via email. Instalist was written about on Engadget.

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The entire Knag family is very intelligent and hardworking. Some of the in-laws in my family believe we carry some sort of perfectionist syndrome. But hey, it is just the way we are. We are successful, determined, and free thinking. Please don’t envy our hard work and determination.

Before I saw success in software, my interests and goals in life were very different. There was a time when I was a gym rat and trained and studied Brazilian Jiu Jitsu every day of the week. I loved how grappling allowed me to be creative, lots of my colleagues would speak highly of my ‘style’ that can described as unorthodox. My style likely dates back to my wrestling days in high school. I always seemed to have a disadvantage in speed, strength and endurance. Because of this, I became successful with an unorthodox style that opponents used to seeing. I remember visiting NYU on a recruiting visit, and the head coach did not recognize me as a wrestler (I looked too skinny). In modern college wrestling, it seems like just about every wrestler has adopted some sort of ‘funk’ into their arsenal.

I loved Brazilian Jiu Jitsu so much that I believed that I would teach and own my own school, and fight in the UFC. I decided to take some time off from school at the University of Colorado – Boulder to focus on training and work on a software project. At one point, I felt very proficient, and was able to submit fighters in the UFC while sparring.

Then came the summer of 2010, I had an argument with a roommate in Boulder. The very next day, I decided to drive to Boston. I decided that I was going to train at Wai Kru and continue to program for myself and this company called Caring Family. I was training 7 days a week and programming. I considered myself to be selfish. I needed to ‘make it’ so I did not spend much time trying to get a girlfriend. I was happy with this life.

Then one fateful day, I experienced back pain. I took a week off training but it pain did not just stop. I went a chiropractor and and he looked terrified when he saw that condition my back was in. I also went to an orthopedic surgeon who recommended a an epidural, a steroid used to help with the pain. After three epidurals, I was left with no choice but to stop training. A was about to transition to a major lifestyle change. As a side note, for people with back problems, I highly recommend practicing yoga. It really helps strengthen your core, thus alleviating back problems. On top of that, it serves as a great stress reliever.

I moved back to Boulder and I was on a mission. I programmed night and day. I once again avoided dating just to focus on being successful. In about 10 months time after graduating, I achieved that success that I wanted and believed I deserved. If I had never injured my back, I very well could have still been a gym rat training Brazilian Jiu Jitsu.

I still train submission wrestling at the Edge in Hoboken, but the excitement that I used to have for the martial art has diminished. I enjoy living it up in Hoboken. Depending how you look at it, my back injury could have been a blessing in disguise.

After officially starting my own software company back in 2009, I have neglected to setup a company website until now. My company took off in the middle of 2011, and by then there was such a high demand for mobile app developers. I figured that I would be swarmed with emails from companies asking for my services. I finally decided to setup my own company website to help express the direction my LLC is moving towards. Some of my friends and colleagues have claimed that I have ‘made it’ as I never had a full-time job in my life, and have been living a rather lavish lifestyle in the exclusive uptown Hoboken area. While I have been successful, I absolutely refuse to be complacent. About a year ago, I was earning enough money through app revenue to that I literally did not have to work any hours to pay my bills and save for retirement. As relieving as this may sound, this time in my life left me isolated and unmotivated. I’ve always been successful with inventing new types of technologies, and I love coming up with clever solutions to real world problems. One of my latest projects consists of a car finding app. There are several apps that require you to open your app, and press a few buttons to mark your location. If one remembers to do that, they will most-likely remember where they parked their car. With technologies such as Bluetooth, the extended features to come out every year for the smartphone platforms, and the internal GPS data from the auto companies, a very practical car finding app can be put together.

In the app space, I’ve specialized in prototyping. I have come up with ideas, filled niches, listened to friend’s app pitches, and have tried to crack out a prototype within a day. I’ve released an open sourced framework that publishes App’s QR code links to Facebook accounts with my affiliate ID attached to it and released it within 24 hours. I noticed the Dropbox iOS app lacked a feature where you cannot download a file from any given URL. I put together a functional app that downloads any file with a URL using their API and released it in about a week. To this day, it has made over 6 digits. You can download Download with Dropbox – Simple Downloader and Uploader Manager here.

What I love about being in the mobile app scene is that there seems to be no boundaries as to what can be accomplished. Completing a near flawless app powered by the world’s most powerful servers that keep the world connected is a very satisfying experience. My latest app is Instalist – Automated Valentine’s Gift Lift Creator. The app uses Amazon’s powerful product API, as well as Python scripts that help scalp the relevant data needed to appear in my app. From the moment my friend and business parter Desi Saran pitched me an inspiring idea, I became very determined to release a polished product. While the experience as a whole was very positive, I must admit that the final hours of polishing and perfecting the app were pretty tedious.

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. ‘Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,’ he told me, ‘just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.’

The final thing I would like to mention in this first post is that Knag Enterprises is not only about profit driven software. I care very much about giving opportunities to the less fortunate. For over a year now, I have been planning and setting up an after school program for the children of Newark to learn more about computers. I was very fortunate to grow up in a well off suburban area with caring, and friendly neighbors. In addition, I also had the fortune of being the son of Ralph Knag, who was an engineer at the world famous Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, NJ. For those who do not know, the best and the brightest pushed their minds to the limit and invented extraordinary things such as the cell phone, the UNIX operating system, the transistor, and the C programming language. C is the foundation to every other programming language in existence. So basically, all software in existence today is derived from Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, NJ. With Bell Labs and Princeton University, it is pretty ironic that New Jersey has such negative stereotypes involving Jersey Shore type things. Anyhow, growing up my father introduced me to a variety of educational games, and other types of ground breaking content that molded me into the person I am today. With the fortunate life I was given, and the success I have attained at a young age, I see it as a responsibility to give back. A cheap laptop with internet access gives the beholder access unlimited information to progress in absolutely anything they wish to pursue. On the other hand, a laptop with internet access can also be a host to nasty content, filled with dirty material that can harm our children or anyone for that matter. The goal of my philanthropic project is to guide the children to demonstrate how they can use computers and the internet to better themselves. I remember always thinking to myself that I would rather live in an tiny cabin with a computer and internet than live in a mansion that lacks computer technology. Without question, computers are the equal playing ground, they can help people escape poverty and lower the cost of higher education. The best part about this is that the barrier to entry (owning a computer) is no longer expensive. However, the time and effort to guide our youth is the most needed resource for my philanthropic project to be successful.

Justin Knag’s Portfolio

About Me

I am a recent graduate from the University of Colorado in Boulder. I’ve earned an Economics degree as well as a minor in Computer Science. As of now, I would like to continue to work/study in the computer science field and possiby combine my knowledge of economics in my work. Someday I hope to become a successful entrepreneur owning the rights to a wide variety software solutions. Recently I have started to develop mobile applications for the iPhone and Android platforms. Aside from technical skills, I enjoy practicing Brazilian Jiu Jitsu as well as skiing.